


Reasons to Fight

by DestielsDestiny



Series: Searching for Poe Dameron [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Awesome Leia Organa, BAMF Leia Organa, BAMF Luke, Badass Finn, Because it's what Poe would want, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Jedi, Jedi Rey, POV Finn (Star Wars), POV Rey (Star Wars), Poe Dameron Needs A Hug, Poe is declared MIA, Protective Finn, Sad Luke, The Resistance goes on, first in a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 05:12:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12125247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: They lose Poe on a reconnaissance mission of all things. They don’t let him die there though.





	Reasons to Fight

They lose Poe on a reconnaissance mission of all things. 

His radio signal goes dark mere moments before the blip of Black One on the tactical display fizzes out in a burst of light and white noise. The General staggers so badly she falls into Admiral Ackbar. 

Three hangars away, Luke and Rey shudder to a stop, lightsabers humming in the stunned silence of the Force. Rey cries out, her eyes wild and desperate, running towards the back of the hangar, “Finn!” 

Behind her, unobserved by anyone but the Force, the last Jedi Master falls to his knees on the deck, his saber clattering away, unlit and unnoticed. Luke feels a sob begin to rip through his chest, “I’m sorry Shara, I failed you.”

Rey finds Finn playing with BB-8 at the back of the deck, the droid undergoing routine maintenance that had temporarily grounded her from Poe’s mission. And for a moment, Rey is so grateful for that that it takes her breath away, before guilt crashes over her head. 

Finn barely glances at her at first. “Hey Rey, come join us, BB was showing me this really neat-“ And then he turns to look at Rey properly, the words dying on his lips. 

They live in a literal warzone, but Finn has never seen that look of devastation on his friend’s face, not since Han-

“What’s happened? Rey?” His voice wobbled, and for all that Finn was only passingly Force Sensitive, somehow, he knows even before she chokes out the words, “Finn…it’s Poe.” 

BB-8 screams. There is no other word to describe the high pitched, soul wrenching cry that issues from the little droids vocal circuits, and orange blur shooting past their legs in the direction Rey has come. 

Finn strides towards his best friend and catches her in a crushing hug, and together, they let each other have a shoulder to cry on. 

Because Poe is no longer there to do it for them. 

00

The General insists on searching the entire quadrant for Poe. Master Skywalker hasn’t flown in decades, but he takes an X-Wing up without asking, BB-8 already waiting for him every morning, loaded and desperate. Together, they scoure the coordinates anywhere remotely close to Poe’s last acknowledged location. They don’t find him.

For days, they search. Even though they know it will be in vain. 

On fourteenth day, Luke walks quietly into the command centre, and places a piece of hull plating on the Ops desk. His mech hand is trembling as he does so. 

Around his ankles, BB is silent. 

The plating is black, the edges of what might once have been an orange flame just barely visible along the top. Leia’s hands are rock steady as she lifts it up, staring until her eyes begin to shimmer. 

For a long time, nobody moves. 

BB knocks into the back of Luke’s legs, and he approaches his sister carefully. “Leia…I’ll keep looking. He might still be out there.” 

The General’s voice is sharp and hard as she regards her brother. “Is he still out there?” 

She doesn’t ask, “Can you sense him?” She doesn’t have to. 

Luke hesitates for a moment too long. At the back of the room, Finn feels his shoulders slump painfully. Beside him, Rey tightens her hand in his, reaching her opposite one across to squeeze Jessica’s as well. 

Master Skywalker still doesn’t say what they’re all thinking. “I’ll keep searching Leia. Until I can be sure.” 

For a moment, the General’s face is filled with nothing but love for the man before her, willing to hold onto hope, until all hope is long past gone. Willing to try and make up some more hope after that, through will power alone. In that moment, Finn can truly see the connection between the twins. 

Then she blinks, they all blink, and remember that they are still fighting a war they are less likely to win than they were two weeks ago. 

“No Luke. It’s time to move on.” Finn could hate her for that, if he wasn’t absolutely positive it was one of the hardest things this woman has ever had to say. 

Luke’s head slumps, his hand reaching down to wrest on BB-8’s hull. 

Leia turns to Lieutenant Connix, defeat in every line of her frame. “Lieutenant, let the record state that on this date, I officially declared Group Commander Poe Dameron Killed in Action.” 

They lost Poe on a reconnaissance mission. And with him, Finn’s belief that the Force might be anything besides just plain cruel. 

00

BB-8 refuses to leave Master Luke’s side after that, constantly bumping into the man’s legs with a mournful warble. R2-D2 puts up with it with a surprising amount of tolerance Rey thinks, until one evening when she sits beside Luke in the Mess, watching BB tremble small circles around the larger droid. 

“It’s good of him to tolerate that.” Master Luke looks startled, following her eyes to the droids. “Tolerate what Rey?” Rey feels startled herself. “Well, BB-8 following you both around like she does. Since-“ Rey bites her own tongue to cut off that sentence. It has been just over a month since Poe’s death, and none of them are yet ready to say his name in casual conversation. 

Luke shifts beside her, a look of great pain crossing his face for a moment. Rey wishes more than almost anything that that look wasn’t one of the most familiar she’s ever seen on her Master’s face. She hates that look. Almost as much as she hates the galaxy for putting it there. 

“Ah, no, tolerance doesn’t enter into it Rey.” Luke dipped his head towards R2 shaking back and forth at BB. In annoyance she had thought, but looking closer, perhaps it is commiseration?

“You see, R2 programmed BB-8, when we built her for Poe.” 

Rey stares at the droids, the words hitting her like a tidal wave of realization. 

It is then that she begins to suspect most of them haven’t the faintest idea what Poe meant to the Skywalker twins. 

00

Finn comes to a realization all of a week after Poe is lost. 

They are sitting morosely against the Hangar wall, watching with fixed gazes’ as Luke kneels several meters away, apparently attempting to talk Poe’s droid out of literally self-destructing. 

Finn knows the feeling. The entire kriffing galaxy knows the feeling. 

Rey’s shoulder bumps his abruptly, an indrawn breath gaining a flicker of the Jedi Master’s eyes in their direction. Finn shifts just enough to meet Rey’s gaze. She looks stricken. 

“What was he like?” Finn’s stomach dropped. He didn’t ask who he was. 

Rey trips out another sentence on the heels of the first, her eyes firmly fixed on the dulled orange of BB’s perpetually spinning head stalk. 

“It just occurred to me, that I only actually met him twice.” 

Finn blinks, his head whipping to stare at Rey. Their eyes are too blurry to tell which of them is the one crying. Across the way, BB8 is keening. 

Rey swallowed her tears. “So, what was he like?” 

Finn swallowed his grief, his arm tightening around his companion’s shoulders. 

Across the way, Luke is hunched around the little droid so closely it’s impossible to tell who is keening anymore. 

You need a pilot. I need a pilot. 

Finn swallowed yet again, realization trickling its icy way down his throat. 

“I’m not sure Rey,” Finn met his best friend’s horrified gaze, “I didn’t really know him that well either.” They don’t say, we never got the chance. They don’t look at the Jedi and the Droid grieving together on the D’Qar hangar deck in broad daylight. 

They just huddle closer to each other, and hold as if they will never let go again.

00

He asks Jess about it, two days after the memorial service. 

Jess whirls on Finn, all greasy stained hair and tear stained face. She looks fierce and wild and utterly broken. Finn suspects they all look rather like that these days. Since Poe. 

“Fine! You wanna know who Poe Dameron was?” Her voice doesn’t crack, and neither does Finn’s expression. Neither of them is proud of that. 

Jess stepped into his personal space, her X-wing framing her shoulders in an orange-red haze. “He was the fucking best of us, that’s what.” Fists curl until nails bite deep. Finn can almost feel an answering ache ghosting across his freshly scarring palms. They all do that a lot these days too. Since. 

“The best there ever was or will be.” Jess jerked her chin away, tears glistening yet stubbornly refusing to slide. It turns out that there truly isn’t a finite number of tears you can cry for a person. 

Breath gusts against his cheek as the newly promoted group-commander takes a careful step backwards, her shoulders hunched apologetically. Finn wants to tell her its okay, he knows she wasn’t ever angry at him. But his lungs won’t spare him the breadth. 

Jess glances at him, almost uncertain. “He was just Poe…you know?” Finn swallows hard. 

The name’s Poe. Poe Dameron. 

Well I ain’t using it. How bout Finn?

No, keep it. It suits you. 

You’re a good man Finn. 

Poe was Finn’s hero. His first friend. The man who gave him a name, and eventually a home and an identity. The man who taught him what it felt like to be a person in another’s eyes. Or perhaps even in his own, one day. 

Poe was everything Finn aspires to be, everything he knows he will never be. Poe was Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker. Poe was larger than life, better and truer than too good to be true. 

Poe was their heart, their soul, their leader and their warrior. He was their friend, brother, son. Poe Dameron was the Resistance, in the same way Luke Skywalker was the Jedi or Leia Organa was the Republic. 

Admittedly, Finn knows he’s beyond biased, but it doesn’t change any of it. Make any of it less true. 

Finn met Jess’ gaze, tears of his own streaking down his upraised chin. 

“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Commander.” A jaw tightening, a head raising. Poe would want them to do their best. To be strong. To go on. To fight. To live. 

“He was Poe.” Finn swallowed again, and somehow, impossibly, found the willpower to offer the morning the slightest of smiles. “Our Poe.” 

00

Rey doesn’t set out to ask General Organa about Poe. None of them set out to do much of anything in those early days after the memorial service. Oh, they keep fighting for the future of the galaxy, keeping doing their jobs and going through the motions, but everything has a depressed, dreamlike quality to it. 

Rey thinks she should find it odder, the dramatic effect the loss of just one person can have on a group numbering in the thousands. It shouldn’t feel this way, she suspects. As if the whole universe should have stopped, simply because one man was…lost. 

No one says died. Not now. And probably not ever. 

None of them sleep much these days, if they ever did. So inevitably, one night it’s just Rey and the General in the Mess. 

The General offers her something brown and warm. Rey decides she likes it. 

“It was Poe’s favourite.” A sad smile on the graceful, still beautiful face. “He got that one from me.” There should have been a laugh there, once upon a time. Not that deep grief. 

The General stares at the cup in her hands, as if the brown liquid holds the answers to the universe. Oh if only life were so simple. 

“He could never decide who he wanted to be, you know?” Warm brown eyes, the exact shade of her son’s and yet so very different, focus on Rey’s face intently, lost in memory and yet completely in the present. The raspy voice drops a little lower, sadness waring with fondness in Leia’s eyes. 

“Han used to call him “our little twin”, because he was always changing his mind.” Those eyes should be liquid with tears, but somehow, there is joy there instead. Tinged joy yes, but joy nonetheless. Somehow, it gives Rey hope. 

“One week he’d be following Luke around, begging to see his lightsaber and sneaking into the cockpit of his X-Wing, the next the little rascal would stow away into tactical meetings and “help” me writing diplomatic envoys.” The General laughs here, her voice cracked with more than age and weariness. 

“He wanted to be like us so badly. Ben was always so jealous.” 

Rey isn’t sure what possesses her, but reaching across the table to grasp the hand of this woman she’s known less than a year, less than three months even, really, seems like the most natural thing in the world. 

Rey doesn’t know who her parents are, not biologically. She knows they aren’t Skywalkers, any more than they are Organas or Solos or even Kenobis. But she knows exactly who her family is, right here in front of her. 

And no matter what she does, she can never quite shake the feeling that that family has just lost it’s heart. 

But bitter truth or not, that doesn’t help any of them in this moment. 

Instead, in this moment, Rey squeezes Leia Organa’s hand, leans forward, and tries her very best to keep her voice steady, “I miss him too.” 

And it isn’t much, it’s barely anything really. A choked whimper in a galaxy of darkness that just got a whole lot darker. 

But then the General squeezes back, her eyes piercing into Rey’s soul, and for just a moment, however infinitesimal, that is enough. 

00

Nobody asks Luke anything, not about Poe. Whether this is because they don’t know enough of the history to think of it, whether they are too in awe of a living legend, whether it is grief or oversight or fear or just coincidence, nobody asks.   
So he tells them instead. 

He sits crosslegged in the cockpit of an X-Wing and tells Poe’s pilots about the first time he taught a little boy to fly over the forests of Yavin IV. 

He passes Rey tool after tool as she completes maintenance on a subdued BB8, regaling her with tales of how Poe’s favourite colour when he was a kid was orange. Eventually, slowly, BB even begins to offer the occasional beep in agreement. It brings a smile to everyone’s face to hear. 

He whirls a lightsaber in front of Finn’s awed face, a fond smile hidden partially under his beard. “Poe was always trying to get me to show him how to use this blade.” Finn grins brighter than the suns of Tatooine. 

He sits across from Leia at all hours of the night, plotting and planning and remembering.   
“It’s okay to miss him Leia.” His sister shoots him an arid look, “Have you ever thought about taking your own advice, oh wise Jedi Master.” Luke cracks a grin, and for the first time in nearly three decades, doesn’t flinch at his most famous, and still most apt, title. 

He stares implacably at General Hux through a view screen, his shoulders set, his hands folded calmly in his robes. “He was worth a thousand of you, in ways you will never begin to comprehend.” 

He leans back against the Ops Table with General Ackbar, listening to the General call Poe “the finest tactician I’ve ever come across,” and his nod is almost free of tears. 

He sits in the Mess and listens to Threepio talk about Master Poe until his mechanical voice begins to fail, and dares anyone to stop the droid. 

He rises before dawn every morning, walks slowly to the outermost edges of the base, to a secluded spot where he can watch the morning sun rise. He settles down before the quiet slab of Yavin Marble, tracing the words absently with his organic hand. 

He strokes BB’s dome with his gloved hand, watches the first rays of the sun begin to touch the sky, and remembers a little boy who wanted to grow up to be a princess, a pilot, a Jedi, a hero, and a farmer all in one. 

No one ever asks Luke Skywalker what he thought of Poe Dameron. 

So every morning, he shows them instead. 

00

The latest spate of new recruits is cause for celebration, everyone more excited and hopeful then they’ve been in a long, long time. 

It takes three days for Finn to be asked the question, and he stutters to a choking halt when he realizes how very long a time that is. 

It’s only been ten months. It feels like a lifetime. 

So far, time has not healed a single wound. Finn privately hopes it never will. There are some things he never wants to forget. 

So he stands before a wet behind the ears kid, squeaky new flight suit and attitude larger than Beggar’s canyon, where ever that is. Master Luke is a terrible influence on them all.

“So who was this Poe Dameron guy anyway?” 

Finn clenches his fists tightly enough to hurt, squares his shoulders, and says the first thing that comes to mind. 

“He’s what we’re all fighting for. That’s who he is.” 

Is, not was. Because if the Light Side has taught Finn anything, it’s that some ideas never die. No matter how dark the galaxy gets. 

And Finn will be damned if he ever lets anyone forget that, not for one second. 

Because he knows it must be true. He learned it from Poe Dameron after all.


End file.
